Tourism employee ambidexterity: The roles of servant leadership, job crafting, and perspective taking

Abstract

Employee ambidexterity can contribute to the organization's optimal exploitation of the current services and exploration of opportunities to innovate or adapt services. Our research seeks to examine how and when servant leadership shapes salesperson ambidexterity in terms of attention-to-detail and adaptive selling behaviors in the tourism industry. This study conducted three-wave surveys among participants from tour companies and analyzed the data through multilevel structural equation modeling (MSEM). The results revealed that servant leadership was associated with job crafting behaviors among salespersons in the tourism industry especially when salespersons demonstrated high levels of perspective taking. The findings further demonstrated the positive nexuses between salesperson resource seeking and their attention-to-detail behavior, and between salesperson challenge seeking and their adaptive selling behavior, as well as the negative nexus between salesperson demand reducing and their adaptive selling behavior. While resource seeking was found to mediate the relationship between servant leadership and salesperson attention-to-detail, challenge seeking was reported to mediate the link between servant leadership and adaptive selling.